Obama's custom-tailored Latino pitch

President Barack Obama’s got a version of his “We can’t wait” drive customized for the Latino audience.

Never heard of it? Unless you’re a Latino voter, that’s no surprise.

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Over the past few months, the Obama administration has rolled out a series of executive actions that often garner little attention from the English-language press but get huge coverage in the Spanish-language media and other outlets favored by Hispanics.

As Obama’s GOP rivals face the primaries’ first sizable group of Latino voters, in Florida, the president’s use of executive power to court the potentially pivotal demographic group already is well under way. And Obama’s team is heavily promoting his actions to their target audience.

When Obama sat down with Spanish-language network Univision on Wednesday, one of the first things he did was boast about the immigration policies he’s altered.

“Some of the changes that we’re making on immigration, we’re trying to make sure that we’re prioritizing criminals [for deportation],” the president said, without really being asked.

Latino advocates say they’ve noticed a new level of engagement from the White House.

“They want to tell Latinos what they’re doing. That’s clear,” said Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.), an outspoken immigration reform advocate who has pushed the administration to take unilateral steps to ease and refocus immigration enforcement.

Gutierrez said the proposals initially got a chilly reception from Obama and his aides, but the administration seems to be coming around.

“Before they weren’t worried about communicating with anyone in terms of the immigration sphere, except the very restrictionist community which they spoke to in very clear terms for three years. Every time they had a press conference on how many deportations, they weren’t shy about telling us,” Gutierrez said. “So, there is a difference [now], and I’m happy. Does it take a campaign to bring that out? Maybe. But there are more families being kept together as a result of the changes.”

The steady stream of under-the-radar moves to tweak the immigration system are aimed at re-energizing Latino voters disappointed by Obama’s failure to win — or even make a serious push on — a comprehensive immigration overhaul, and by the record-setting number of deportations carried out since Obama took office, Democrats say.

Gutierrez dates the administration’s new focus on immigration issues to Obama’s appearance last July before the National Council of La Raza. As Obama explained to the Latino activists that he had little ability to change the immigration process without help from Congress, the crowd broke into a variation of his 2008 campaign slogan.

Since that visit, the administration has discovered new flexibility to change a variety of immigration-related policies without the approval of Congress.

In August, the federal government promised to refocus deportations on criminals and launched an unprecedented review of all pending deportation cases, including those in which a final deportation order has been issued. In December, the Department of Homeland Security announced a toll-free hot line for citizens mistakenly detained as foreigners.

Earlier this month, Obama’s appointees began the process of tweaking the green-card policy, curtailing potentially dangerous trips to consulates in violence-plagued Mexico — another change the president highlighted in his Univision interview. A few days later, DHS released a policy enhancing the rights of lawyers representing immigrants in deportation proceedings.

“In the mainstream press, I don’t see a lot of news about the waiver [process for green cards] and the deportation review, but you can see that in the Spanish media all the time,” said Antonieta Cadiz, White House correspondent for La Opinión, a Spanish-language paper in Los Angeles. “The administrative relief measures: That’s something important.”